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Choosing one film out of 12 to honour with TIFF’s new $25,000 international cinema prize will be like finding a lover or experiencing a peak emotion, members of the jury say.

“It’s a little bit like dating with these 12 films,” Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke said Friday, in a meet-the-press session along with his fellow jurors and filmmakers, Agnieszka Holland of Poland and Claire Denis of France.

“You meet them all and then you see which one you hit it off with. But I hope I’ll fall in love with at least one. I’ll be in trouble if I fall in love with six. I’ll go crazy!”

Holland and Denis agreed, expressing their desire to have an “emotional reaction” to the films they’ll be judging, rather than a strictly professional one.

The title of Jia’s 2000 film Platform, a drama of social change, was chosen as the name for the new juried TIFF program that will keep him busy watching films for 10 days during the festival, alongside Holland and Denis.

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Platform was created by TIFF’s Piers Handling and Cameron Bailey to showcase a slate of unique films by emerging global directors, out of the hundreds that the festival screens.

TIFF has other film juries, for Canadian features and first features, but this is the fest’s first attempt at a competition similar to the Palme d’Or race at Cannes (although Handling hates the word “competition”).

All three jurors are celebrated filmmakers, with a host of international awards and nominations, and they’ve all had previous experience on various festival juries. Jia, 45, and Denis, 69, have both been Palme d’Or contenders (Jia won the 2013 Cannes screenplay prize for a Touch of Sin) and Holland, 66, has Oscar experience, receiving an adapted screenplay nomination in 1990 for Europa Europa.

All three expressed the standard lament of festival jurors everywhere that even though they don’t like judging art, they’ll do their best regardless.

But as serious as their job is, they all prefer to think of themselves as regular members of the audience, hoping to swoon at what they see on the screen. In keeping with TIFF’s populist spirit, they’ll watch the Platform films along with critics and regular filmgoers at daily screenings at the Elgin Theatre, before making their final choice to be announced Sept. 20, at festival’s end.

“It’s not really fun to judge a film as a professional. It’s boring,” Denis said, adding that she prefers to be in the centre of the theatre, surrounded by other movie lovers.

“We make films, so we have already our own judgment about our own work that is sometimes not easy. For me, as an audience (member), it’s always the emotional surprise, to be taken to a part of my emotions that I never expected.”

Holland said she prefers to sit right up front (“Filmmakers like to be close to the screen”), all the better to allow her emotions to flow freely.

Despite her reluctance to judge art, she agreed to be on the Platform jury, and other juries in the past, because “it opens us up not only to the other films but also to the different sensibilities and approaches. It opens the mind, and can be very inspiring. That’s what I’m hoping for here.”

Speaking through an interpreter, Jia said that along with falling in love with one of the Platform films, “another wish is that the film will offer a possibility of a new film language and of a new cinema to emerge.”

That’s a tall order for 12 films, but Handling and Bailey are confident the dozen they chose from 300 to 400 contenders are worthy of such close secrecy. The Platform contenders include one Canadian entry, the tough Steve Fonyo doc Hurt by Toronto’s Alan Zweig, as well as the hot-ticket dystopian drama High-Rise by Britain’s Ben Wheatley.

The jurors expressed reluctance that they could only give one prize. Many festivals allow for multiple prizes, including spontaneous “jury prizes” like the ones they have at Cannes.

Handling hinted the one-prize rule could be bent, because TIFF wants to have an “organic process . . . we want to be flexible.”

There appears to be little flexibility regarding the cigarette smoking that all three jurors wish to engage in — Toronto’s antismoking bylaws are pretty strict — but Denis said they will try to find a way to indulge their love of tobacco along with their film ardour.

“We will find a place to smoke and drink, I hope, with our black jackets!”

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